Because having S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill for a cousin wasn't trial enough. Marlo just HAD to get her genes altered by the Tesseract Energy. Typical. Well, at least there's this really cute guy… who turns green… and has serious anger management problems. Did I mention he's cute?

Hit Me With Your Best Shot:

The Impossible Prologue:

Even under normal circumstances, Marlo Hill was known to sleep like the dead, that she was sick only compounded the issue. Despite this, she was rather accustomed to waking to find her surroundings relatively unchanged, so she was understandably confused to wake and find that she could not see, could not hear, could not even move. In fact, it felt as though she could barely breathe.

She should have felt miserable, but, aside from a sense of surprised panic, she felt fine.

Better than fine.

Her blood was fairly singing with energy as it rushed through her veins. She had such a complete physical awareness, could even feel where every hair on her head was connected, it felt almost like her cells were vibrating with that unending energy. She felt lightheaded, though whether it was from that strange sensation or the lack of air was unclear.

Perhaps it was a bit of both.

Time passed, minutes, hours, maybe only seconds, it was difficult to tell. All she knew was that time did indeed pass, if only because it must.

The energy, the singing in her blood, was gradually becoming an unpleasant sensation, coalescing as an explosive pressure behind her eyes. The vibration of her cells became a painful thing, almost as if her very structure would come undone. The singing of her blood felt more like burning, she felt like she was burning alive.

It was not a pleasant sensation.

Without thought or direction she began to thrash, desperate to relieve the pain. The burning, tearing pain. In one wild jerk the top of her left hand smashed against whatever it was that held her in place and there was a blinding flash.

Accompanied by a sound that was a mixture of thunder and electricity, the flash of blue light seemed to have freed her from her imprisonment, for she could breathe again.

Eyes blind with the afterimage, ears ringing, she was claimed by a different sort of darkness.

She would not wake again for some time.

Agent Maria Hill was known for her ability to keep focused on the task at hand, was even disliked by some because of it. Cold, she had been called, though any woman in the same field would understand. One lost certain things when one was determined to not let something like their gender hold them back.

Even so, if ever her ability to remain detached while under trying circumstances were to be looked upon as a flaw rather than an asset by those surrounding her, it was now. An Asgardian had appeared, their base destroyed, a number of their men corrupted or killed, and, most personally significant for her, her cousin was missing, presumed dead.

Instead of floundering, grieving, or worrying, she was levelheaded and cool, awaiting orders like the well-trained SHIELD operative that she was. When news of a woman being found deep in the wreckage, near the point of origin, reached her, she reacted with all speed not because she felt the bubbling hope that it was Marlo, but because it was impossible.

She had strange dreams. Strange, blue tinted dreams.

Blue, why blue?

Nightmares really.

People dying.

A terrible man. A terrible, hurting, mad man. She would pity him, if he weren't so terrible.

What she didn't understand was why Eric was there, he even seemed to be working for the terrible man. Barton, too.

She didn't really know much about the man who had kept a careful, if distant, eye on the Tesseract project, but he seemed nice enough. Too serious most of the time, but he had a dry sort of humor that she could appreciate, it reminded her a bit of her uncle, actually. And he was always polite to her on the rare occasion that she was asked to bring him lunch.

She didn't know much about him, but still, he didn't seem like the sort of person to work for such a terrible man.

There were others, too, but those were the only faces for which she had names.

Then she was away, dreaming something else.

The blue was stronger. It was harder to see the images beyond the veil of color.

Blue, again with the blue.

This dream was normal, just another day of work.

But, no, that was wrong.

The terrible man was here, too.

He had come… from… the Tesseract? Was that right?

But, wasn't that impossible?

Or… no. No, that was what it was supposed to do. A great, big, blue door.

Blue, why did that seem significant?

The terrible man had appeared at her workplace.

Not a dream, then. Another nightmare.

More death.

The first deaths, she realized, somehow this had come before the other dream.

She was strangely impressed that he attacked Fury.

She had met him once, the Director, he was terribly frightening.

She wasn't impressed that he had attacked Fury so much as she was impressed that he had the gall to attack Fury. It just didn't seem like the sort of thing that happened very often. Then again, the terrible man was mad.

Maybe madness was a requirement when facing down Director Fury… yes, that seemed like a reasonable requirement.

She couldn't understand why her thoughts were so disjointed, normally she operated with great clarity. Then she remembered. She was dreaming.

But that was odd for her, wasn't it? She was ill. She never really dreamed when ill, except when suffering from fever and then her dreams were strange things indeed, involving things like purple tigers and flying kangaroos. Not this terrible, but plausible, violence.

And something about the blue shade to her dreams was really nagging at her.

She knew this blue, had seen it before. She was certain she should know its significance. She was intelligent, extremely so. She even understood Eric when he started to ramble, and that was quite the accomplishment. Even the other scientists got lost when he-

Oh! Of course. How dense was she?

But… that still didn't make much sense. That was impossible, wasn't it?

Impossible was the word.

As the agents in the helicopter made another pass over the wreckage, the only word that passed through their minds was 'impossible'. Where everywhere else the evidence of the implosion was made plain, a great deep crater in the earth, filled with the rubble of collapsed halls and rooms, like the footprint of an impossible giant, there was one spot that was clearly different from the rest.

It was like looking into a well.

Or a pit.

With the inside smooth, like one solid piece of rock, and the outer lip puckered out, thinning as it got farther from the opening, it was clearly an impossible thing. And yet the faint glowing that still remained in the walls of the pit in places told plainly what had happened, though the 'how' was still unknown.

Impossible, too, was the form of the woman that lay at the bottom. Her clothes were gone, or near about, but her body was apparently unmarred. That she was clearly alive, occasionally moving in her sleep, was also amazingly impossible.

It took some time before the walls cooled enough to let them reach her.

Her modesty was returned to her only once she had been identified as Marlo Sophia Hill, civilian, cousin to SHIELD agent Maria Hill, and office aid to one Eric Selvig. The impossible woman was seen to by medics and proclaimed, aside from a severe burn across the top of her left hand, to be in perfect health, her unconscious state the result of general exhaustion. That this prompted further examinations that became increasingly less medical and increasingly more scientific should come as a surprise to no one.

It was SHIELD after all.

And the impossible woman kept getting even more impossible. Her burn healed within the first hour, gone with not even a reddening of the skin to mark its passing. It was the energy readings though, that really got their attention.

They were intimately familiar with the energy signature she was radiating. Of course they were, the lost facility had been used almost exclusively to study it. She had the same energy as the Tesseract.

But that, of course, was impossible.